I got sick this week, for the first time! In all the years I’ve been in South America, I’ve always prided myself on the fact that I have never had stomach problems. While pretty much everyone else I know who has ever come here has got sick at least once really badly, its never happened to me. Usually it happens on the first trip, just because most North Americans and Europeans don’t have the necessary bacteria, or because they are used to eating very sterile food. But never, in all the countries I’ve been to, have I had more than the very occasional hour or so of discomfort.

I’ve got used to being the only one not throwing up in the bushes or running to the toilet every half an hour. I can’t really add much to those long story telling sessions people like to have, where they recount tales of mighty sicknesses past and how they were conquered. As soon as someone starts to look the slightest bit green, out comes all the advice from their eager friends and colleagues, heavily laced with mythical anecdotes of who got sick where from what and how they nearly died after eating an unpeeled tomato. All I have to add are stories of migraines and mysteriously sprained ankles, which aren’t nearly so dramatic as a close shave with dysentery or an encounter that leaves the victim in eternal fear of fried eggs. I’ve always blamed my stomach of steel on the fact that I lived with my brother for a few years in my late teens, and that his fridge – and particularly his pet cheese collection that lurked at the back of it, occasionally threatening to take over the kitchen and the world – gave me a third world immune system. My evidence for this was that his room mate was the only person on his research trip that never got sick in Egypt either. The cheeses protected us all.

But they say pride comes before a fall. For the first time last week I got seriously sick – throwing up, stomach cramps that had me bent double, up all night running to the bathroom, fever and delirium at night, my whole body covered in pains and shivers for three days. And the worst of it? I poisoned myself. I cooked for myself for the first time in 2 months last Wednesday, and although I knew better, my confidence in my own intestinal invincibility meant I didn’t bleach the vegetables properly. I was even boasting about it as I threw in the perilous spring onions and infamous cherry tomatoes. As delicious as the ratatouille was, it wasn’t so pleasant seeing it come back up. No wonder people here hardly ever eat fresh veg.

The people I work with always talk about going on a ‘Bolivia diet’: namely, you get really sick and lose a whole load of weight. Seeing as I never get sick I tend to put weight on here, especially because most meals contain at least five different types of carbohydrate and two of them are inevitably deep fried. But finally I am part of the gang! I haven’t eaten anything other than boiled eggs and crackers in 5 days, have lost loads of weight, and finally I have a horror story to share!

I think the thing that pissed me off the most about the whole experience though can’t really be shared in the anecdote telling sessions. It happened on Friday after lunch, when I hadn’t quiet yet realised how ill I was. Thinking I was feeling better I ate lunch. And about half an hour later I came running out the house trying to get to the bathroom in time to throw it all back up again. Realising I wouldn’t make it, I bent over the flower bed in the patio instead, hurling my guts up and in misery. A colleague of mine who I’ve been living and working with for the last two months was sitting on a bench less than 2 meters away. Now, if someone came running out of a house and started being violently sick right next to me, I think I could confidently say that, no matter whether I knew them well or not, I would at least register some surprise and probably go over to ask if they are ok or offer some kind of help or comfort. But the cold hearted bitch just sat there ignoring me! She didn’t even bat an eyelid! After a while, she deigned to turn around and say in her most patronising manner “Er, I think you might want to go to the bathroom for that?” And that helpful advice was the limit of her comfort to a person being ill. A few hours later she pissed off to La Paz without once making the slightest effort to offer even the most insincere token gesture of concern. It left a far more bitter taste in my mouth than the sickness itself.

Anyway. So if you are ever in South America and need to eat, here are the golden rules that everyone knows and that I (usually) follow too.

1) Never drink water from the tap. Boil it – and keep it boiling for a few moments, use a water filter, or buy bottled water.

2) If you are going to all that trouble to keep your drinking water fresh, don’t then do something stupid like washing your teeth in tap water. Mmm… rubbing bacteria on your gums… great idea.

3) Only eat fruit raw if it can be peeled. Apples are great. Strawberries are not. Farmers don’t wash their produce with bottled water.

4) If you are going to eat fruit or veg that can’t be peeled, be carefully with anything with leaves. If you really want to eat something like lettuce, it has to be washed first in a diluted bleach solution, which in Bolivia at least can be brought in most supermarkets and pharmacies. Lettuce in particular is mostly made of water, so its always going to be risky, plus those little leafy bits are perfect for harbouring bacteria. Most people just avoid lettuce and other fresh non-peelable veg altogether.

5) Meat and dairy. Weigh up each situation as it comes. Personally I always think that, contra to popular opinion, street meat is likely to be just as safe – if not more so – than restaurant food, because you can at least watch how its being cooked. Who knows what’s going on back there in the kitchen? Where as this delicious little piece of kebabed sliced beef heart with a potato on the end is being lovingly charred to my satisfaction right in front of my eyes.

Of course, following the rules becomes a matter of superstition in the end. I always eat the lettuce garnish because I can’t resist it, much to the disbelief of everyone around me (there’s that arrogant pride in my steel stomach again). But I always use bottled water to brush my teeth. Incidentally, it was a unbleached spring onion and a unpeeled tomato that was my undoing this time round.